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Columbia Dissertations and Theses
> Doctoral Dissertations
The abiding frontier : family, gender and religion in Wabanaki history, 1600-1763
| Author(s): | Nash, Alice N. |
| Title: | The abiding frontier : family, gender and religion in Wabanaki history, 1600-1763 |
| Physical Description: | iv, 363 leaves, bound. |
| Issue Date: | 1997 |
| Description: | Department: History.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1997. |
| Bookmark as: | http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:2961 |
| Full Text (ProQuest): | /ac/proxit.jsp?url=http://gateway.proquest.com/ope... |
| Abstract: | Wabanaki Indians, "the people of the dawnland," are the indigenous inhabitants of northern New England, southern Quebec and the Maritimes. The dissertation argues that Wabanaki people survived the colonial period with a strong sense of ethnic identity and cultural distinctiveness--the abiding frontier--in part by renegotiating family and gender relations under the impact of colonization. Warfare, economic changes, and colonization altered material relations within families and between extended groups, and Christian missionaries imposed new ideas about sin, sexuality, subordination and social hierarchy, yet Wabanaki people are too often portrayed (in both Native and non-Native accounts) as timeless and unchanging--in other words, in static, ahistorical terms. The strategies used and choices made by Wabanaki people differed across time and space according to their circumstances. One result is that the written sources are uneven. Thus, this study is not a new, sweeping chronological account but rather a series of interlocking essays that cut into the sources at different points, from different angles--prisms of Wabanaki history. A critical part of my methodology has been to go out of the archives, to speak with Wabanaki people and ask them what they think is missing from history books, and to study the language for clues to Wabanaki culture and worldview. The result is essentially a dialogue between past and present, between the documents and their limitations, and between the victors who wrote the history and the survivors who remembered in private but (mostly) kept silent in public. |
| Collection(s): | Doctoral Dissertations
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